中菲文学交流,可以为我们“赢得时间”

Gaining Opportunity from Cultural Exchange between China and the Philippines

首先,我要谈谈我人生的十字路口:时间回溯到1999年,当时我第一次来北京从事教学工作,并首次接触到中国经典文学,以及包括鲁迅、茅盾与老舍在内的一些中国作家的作品。随即,我对中国文学一见倾心,以至于向当时指导我毕业论文的导师坦言,自己想在菲律宾成为一名研究中国文学的学者。而对于这一令人生畏的目标,首先必须要做的便是掌握号称世界上最难的语言——汉语。

Talk about forking paths:Back in 1999 during my first teaching stint here in Beijing,I first encountered the Chinese fictional classics and some writers like Lu Xun,Mao Dun and Lao She.I was so enamored instantly with Chinese fiction that I confessed to my t hen t hesis a dviser t o t hat I w anted t o b e a s cholar o n Chinese Literature in the Philippines and that in pursuit of such a daunting goal which necessitated that I master the most difficult of languages—Mandarin—I would seek for a scholarship that would allow me to study the language first and then proceed to studying the classics and become the authority on Chinese Literature in the Philippines that I wanted to be at the time.But my late beloved professor in the University of the Philippines had other thoughts in mind:she said that I should rather devote my energies to Philippine Literature and let others—specially the Chinese Filipinos who already knew Mandarin—to do the spade work in this field.Up to the present,however,I know of no scholar writing in English or Filipino in the Philippines who devoted his or her life to this field.